MoCo seeks relief for Porta Potty plan

By
Washington Post editors

Montgomery County officials are fuming over parks chief Mary Bradford’s plan to eliminate portable toilets from the county’s parks, saying she could have found other budget cuts to ensure that park users would have some place other than the woods to relieve themselves.

Bradford and Jennifer Hughes, a top aide to County Executive Isiah Leggett (D), are slated to meet Friday to talk over the problem. Bradford said she needs about $150,000 more in her $69 million budget to ensure that the toilets won’t be taken out of county parks.

Bradford is looking into the possibility of having community groups pay $100 a month per portable toilet to keep them in nearby parks.

County Council member Marc Elrich (D-At Large) said officials need to find a solution, quickly. He said council members did not realize that in the dozens of pages of proposed cuts Bradford put forth, ridding the park of places to go was part of the plan. Some county parks have permanent restrooms that are not affected by the proposal.

But here's a thought, MoCo regulations require safe and adequate sewage disposal for any public gathering.

So, if the outhouses disappear, then close the affected parks, then lay off all of the staff and sell all of the equipment that otherwise would be required to maintain those parks.

Then sell the grounds at a public auction as surplus property. Voila! There is suddenly a large surplus of $$ available.

I'm not seriously suggesting that happen, but when you really think about it, if MNCPPC has so much park land that it cannot even afford to provide the "necessaries" for its use by the public, then maybe the time has come for that agency to seriously re-think its continued insistence at grabbing land at every opportunity, especially when there are other entities, both governmental and non-governmental, that offer to step up to the plate and provide stewardship-- Offers that are summarily rebuked and strongly resisted by MNCPPC in its own delusional ideal of its over-riding self-importance.

Look no further than the 5 YEAR legal effort by the Town of Washington Grove, MD to acquire open space on its borders to protect its historic setting, an effort which has been vehemently opposed by the same agency, MNCPPC, at no doubt tens of thousands of $$ of expense for its lawyers, the same agency which now apparently can't scrape together enough to pay for outhouses for visitors/users of its parks.

I told you to go to the bathroom before we left the house!
Sheez, I hate this kind of budget game; government managers know the best way to protest getting their overall budget cut is to make sure the cuts are painful and public. Seriously, this money is peanuts for this agency but there's no better way to get the extra money (from the county or directly from the community) than to take away toilets.